NJIT students compete in 'Hackathon,' an all-night app development contest

NEWARK — Everything was going well for student software developers Brian Evans and Ketan Patel until the witching hour of 4:30 a.m.

The New Jersey Institute of Technology students were participating in an all-night application development contest, or "Hackathon," when their program crashed.

The pair panicked, but by 5 a.m., they had restored their app that measures the impact of scientific authors by showing how many others have cited them.

"It was a roller coaster of emotions," said Evans.

The 19-year-old Evans of Kearny and Patel, 24, of Union, were among 60 students at NJIT in Newark who competed in the Hackathon, which awarded prizes to the developers of the three top apps.

The students used data from NJIT and from the SciVerse Applications platform created by Elsevier, the global scientific publisher. A computer application, or app, is an interactive software program that performs a specific task.

First place of $1,500 went to Jesse Campbell, a graduate student from Wallington, and Metin Yorulmaz, a graduate student from Turkey living in Rutherford, for their project "SV Social," which lets SciVerse users mark articles as favorites, share them with friends in other social networks and converts text to speech.

The Hackathon "is a good way to force yourself to learn," Yorulmaz said. "You have a limited amount of time and certain goals you have to meet."

Second place, worth $1,000, went to senior Andy Contreras and graduate student John Lin, both of Newark, for their project "Research Drifter," which places scientific papers onto a map of the world corresponding to the university where the research was done. A student trying to decide which Ph.D. program to enter could use the app, for example, to search "therapy of brain tumors," and a Google map will show how many papers have been published by each institution.

Third prize of $500 went to David Daudelin, a junior from Hackettstown, for his project "RoboVisor" — an automated student advising system built from NJIT open data sources.

The experience with the crash demonstrated how "computer science is different from other sciences," Evans said.

"When you hypothesize something, you get to test it right away," Evans pointed out.

The NJIT event was the first app competition sponsored by Elsevier, but the contests are "becoming more common," said Jim Robertson, director of web services for NJIT and chief coordinator of the Hackathon.

The students’ work remains their property but they may choose to sell it to Elsevier or take internships with the company, Robertson said.